SHOW NOTES:
The first thing I need to do this episode is give a huge shout out to the folks over at the philosophy sub over on Reddit, who have been really great in giving feedback and information for future shows, or just general encouragement. This show is I hope going to be philosophically heavy enough to sate even the most voracious student of philosophy, and hopefully future episodes will be even more informative and thought provoking, while also being entertaining I hope.
Usually when I tell people I’m working on a podcast that discusses the paranormal, or even just talk about how interesting I think the subject is, people react in one of two ways. Either the other person will immediately blurt out that they too share this fascination with the unknown, or the person will scoff and say that paranormal beliefs are completely crap. I don’t get the second one all that often, especially considering I’m usually grabbing drinks with other graduate students who are also trying to drown out their thesis related sorrows. I think this is probably because graduate students don’t think anything is impossible after seeing their experiments fail for unknowable and mystical reasons, or maybe because their advisors can oftentimes seem to be possessed by demons. But maybe its also because they’ve spent an awful lot of time dedicated to their science, and so have had to try and fit all their world views with this career and lifepath that we’ve chosen.
Or maybe I just hang out with weirdos. Regardless, I think the underlying idea of the paranormal or fringe ideas being something to scoff at comes from a self assuredness at the power of rational science. However, if we are going to be so sure that science is the true way of knowing about the nature of our existence, and that the paranormal are those things that can simply not fit within that definition of existence, then it seems like people are pretty sure about what exactly science is. But I think that this view of science as a never changing, constant monolith gives us scientists wayyyy too much credit. The definitions of science, the methods by which we do good versus bad science, and how science relates to the world are forever changing things, altered by the politics, society, and economic systems in which a given scientist is found. Besides that, what constitutes good science or how science should be performed is not something agreed upon even in the scientific literature. And if we are going to say that something is not science, then we need a good definition of science so that we can figure out what sorts of things to rule out. In tonights episode we will go over what science and therefore “nature” is, and in this way hopefully come to understand what pseudo science or the paranormal/unnatural must be!
Intro
I always find it fascinating that the people with the highest opinion of scientists are those that, usually, haven’t worked with very many of them. Not to say that the scientists I know aren’t phenomenal, extremely intelligent people, but they are just that: people. From personal experience I can at least state that science is not nearly as cut and dry a thing as people tend to believe. There are many fields where new graduate students are given a paper to read once they join a lab, and then immediately told by their advisors or other graduate students that the paper they just read, although fundamental reading in their field, are deeply flawed or currently no longer believed for a variety of reasons, and so can no longer be trusted. Furthermore scientists may cut corners, or fudge data, or fit things to correspond to a given political or social climate. Famously the Soviets for many years taught that acquired traits could be passed along through genetics, thanks to the work of the Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko. The Soviets rejected the basic tenets of Genetics as they currently stand, instead following the idea of Lamarckian inheritance. The basic premise of Lamarckian inheretence was that the traits of an organism acquired during the lifetime of the organism would be passed down to the offspring. A really broad example of this is that for instance if you were to chop the tail off of a dog its offspring would be born without a tail and would never grow one. The reasoning behind this shift was political of course, with the Soviets using Lysenko as an agricultural genius who showed that the Soviets could win the economic race with the United States. Biologists trained before the soviet revolution were killed and imprisoned, and those taught in the Soviet biological sciences learned and had to accept this work that was very clearly incorrect. And even in the United States today, Science can be an extremely political and economically driven process. My own field of CO2 capture and conversion is one such politically and economically fraught discipline. In many ways the realities of science are therefore much more human, and less robotic, than people tend to believe.
Furthermore just because something may be seemingly naturally occurring does not imply a moral judgement about the thing. Scientific facts should not be used to make normative or moral judgments about the world, and we see this used throughout history for some pretty horrible things. This is the famous naturalist fallacy, known as the is/ought problem, or David Hume’s Guillotuine. Just because something is a certain way, does not imply that it ought to be that way. For instance, while it is the case that humans primarily eat meat, there is no moral reason to suppose that humans should or ought to eat meat. Instead there must be an ethical principle on which to base this judgment. Just because woman have historically been subservient to men does not mean that they ought to be. Because slavery has always existed does not mean that it ought to exist. This is oftentimes mixed up with another similar fallacy, which states that just because something appears natural does not mean that it is actually natural or necessary in any sort of special way, or that there must be a scientific explanation for something that appears to be the natural order. This is another argument that was used at the time to support slavery, where it was suggested that Darwinian evolution could provide a means of showing that those races that were traditionally slaves actually had some biological difference that made them more easily enslaved or suited for slavery type work. Again this argument was also used to explain the domestic situations of women as well, with arguments that they had smaller brain capacity, became more emotionally excited during mental labor, or could not physically do as much as men and so should not be allowed to do jobs that were traditionally given to men. For slavely we see the quotes of Samuel A. Cartwright, who used scientice to try and support slavery. He said quote “If the white man attempts to oppose the Deity's will, by trying to make the negro anything else than "the submissive knee-bender" (which the Almighty declared he should be), by trying to raise him to a level with himself, or by putting himself on an equality with the negro; or if he abuses the power which God has given him over his fellow-man, by being cruel to him, or punishing him in anger, or by neglecting to protect him from the wanton abuses of his fellow-servants and all others, or by denying him the usual comforts and necessaries of life, the negro will run away; but if he keeps him in the position that we learn from the Scriptures he was intended to occupy, that is, the position of submission; and if his master or overseer be kind and gracious in his hearing towards him, without condescension, and at the same time ministers to his physical wants, and protects him from abuses, the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away”. Similarly, we see quotes related to the supposed size of the female brain and therefore naturalness of their lower status compared to men. Paul Broca was one such writer and scientist, whose work was so influential that it set the stage for future work against women’s suffrage and equality, and in fact some of the “Facts” he propogated continue to be used today to justify mysoginists attitudes. His work primarily measured the size of the cranial cavity between men and women, in a field known as Anthropometry, or measuring the human body. He stated “We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively upon the small size of her body. Tiedemann has proposed this explanation. But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men, a difference which we should not exaggerate but which is, nonetheless, real. We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority.”. In both of these cases historical wrongs were committed because science was fit to match a narrative of what ought to be, or was used to further enforce how things were. As Stephen J. Gould writes in “Women’s Brains”, the reasons for instance that Broca’s work stuck around so long is quote “Broca’s work seemed particular invulnerable to refutation. Had he not measured with the most scrupulous care and accuracy? Indeed he had. I have the greatest respect for Broca’s meticulous procedure. His numbers are sound. But science is an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts. Numbers, by themselves, specify nothing. All depends upon what you do with them”. And we see this theme continue even today. Data or numerical trends cannot be used to discuss what is “natural”, or “the correct way”, or “How things ought to be”, because the analysis of this data is always going to be influenced by the thinking and opinions of the person doing the analysis. Think about prison trends in the United States. To see that African American males are incarcerated at rights higher than those of other groups can be viewed in extremely different ways depending on the view points of the person doing the analysis. If African Americans are through socioeconomic or institutional ways at a disadvantage to other peoples then their being jailed at a higher rate is proof of institutional racism. If however one believes that racism does not exist at the institutional level, then the higher incarceration rates can be used to justify a racist belief that African americans are more likely to commit crimes because they are genetically predisposed towards criminality.
Examples like this are one of the many reasons where, as a practicing scientist, I attempt to steel myself against confirmation bias or fallacies that support the status quo of the day. And I also try to make it clear to the people around me that science and scientists are not infallible. While science can tell us about the natural world, the fact that the natural world is a certain way does not mean that it SHOULD BE that way, or that moral or social rules should be inferred from scientific observations.
However notice that this idea that moral rules should be separate from scientific rules only works if you suppose that there is something like free will, which is completely separate from the deterministic mechanisms of the materialist view of the brain as consciousness. In other words, if the soul is simply due to the action of the atoms that compose the brain, then aren’t all of our actions predetermined from our birth? With a strong enough computer, and a deep enough understanding of the way thoughts can be reduced to brain states which can be reduced to the action of the cells of the brain that can be reduced to the interaction of subatomic particles, could we not from birth determine exactly what an organic would do in every situation? If that is true, then what do we do with criminals? Can a criminal really be culpable for their actions if they are simply acting in a mechanistic, predetermined way? This is one argument that is often invoked by some sociologists today, based on the determinism of Karl Marx, where economic situations determine what the most likely way a person will behave are. In this view crime is an economic problem more than a moral one, with lower economic classes being predisposed to crime because of the situations in which they live. But it is something that many scientific determinists do not seem to take seriously when arguing against things such as the soul or mind. To believe that we are just the firing of neurons that can be determined by physics requires that we take vastly different views on things like crime or those who have wronged us, in a way that I am not sure many people would be comfortable with.
We’ve talked a lot about how science has failed in the past, and how nature is often used to make moral claims. I hope that I’ve convinced many of my listeners that science cannot be used to make moral judgments, and furthermore to look for the reasoning behind a prescription given through science to try and figure out if that statement makes sense to you. Science may come to understand what is nature, but it cannot tell us what ought to be, or what the natural state of affairs for human beings should be. But we still haven’t discussed what makes a theory scientific to begin with. One of the greatest differences between scientific and magical thinking is that science is made to be proven wrong, whereas magical thinking is dogmatic. Whereas good science is thought to be changing and adaptive to new information and theories, magic is set in its ways and requires absolute faith to believe.
In fact, this is one of the major ways that philosophers of science have attempted to distinguish between what is and is not real science. Karl Popper came up with this notion, that for something to be considered a real scientific theory or thought it must be falsifiable. In other words, it must be possible to test the truth of a scientific statement against the truth of the natural world. In this way science always corresponds to nature, and with each successive set of false experiments becomes refined to better describe the natural order of things. In this world view scientific laws or theories are not set in stone, instead only being considered true until such time that they can be proven false in some way and refined further. Popper says in “Conjetures and Refutations from 1963”
I knew, of course, the most widely accepted answer to my problem: that science is distinguished from pseudoscience—or from "metaphysics"—by its empirical method, which is essentially inductive, proceeding from observation or experiment. But this did not satisfy me. On the contrary, I often formulated my problem as one of distinguishing between a genuinely empirical method and a non-empirical or even pseudo-empirical method — that is to say, a method which, although it appeals to observation and experiment, nevertheless does not come up to scientific standards. The latter method may be exemplified by astrology, with its stupendous mass of empirical evidence based on observation — on horoscopes and on biographies
These considerations led me in the winter of 1919-20 to conclusions which I may now reformulate as follows.
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.") One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
Poppers view is really closest to the one that I find justifiable as well, that science is primarily a way to refute facts as opposed to putting them forward. Good science shows why something works, but can only get to that point by removing other competing theories around it.
Does the paranormal fit Poppers view of science? Are paranormal viewpoints or theories falsifiable? Well, we can see that a few of them are absolutely falsifiable and therefore so long as they are being attempted in good faith can be considered scientific pursuits. Bigfoot is a scenario where this is the case, although is one where bad science is all too often portrayed on television. While the search for a potential hominid mammal in the deep forests of the North American forests is not all that different from the search for other unknown animals, when the hunt for Bigfoot switches to the dogmatic and therefore not falsifiable is where it fails the tests that Popper describes. To begin with, in the case of Bigfoot we are searching for something specific, as opposed to looking for an unknown creature in the wilderness. This may not seem like a big difference at first, but if we dig a little deeper the distinction becomes clear. For Popper when you are doing science you must have a hypothesis and a test of that hypothesis. Usually however the hypothesis is something small and falsifiable, and it is only in the conglomeration of these smaller hypothesis that you can begin to make a larger claim. Even more important, usually the hypothesis is working off of some other scientists previous investigations of nature. So lets take a very simple example, and one that I’m sure a few of you listeners may have actually done in your elementary school days for a science fair. We are going to hypothesize that a plant placed in direct sunlight will grow better than a plant placed in darkness. Ok, so that is our hypothesis, and now we need some method of testing that hypothesis. Let’s say that we measure the health of the plant by the color of the leaves, with greener being better, and we will also measure how tall our plant can grow over the testing period. Clearly we also need to determine how long the test goes, so lets say 10 days. We also need to choose a type of plant to test, so lets say we test yellow roses. And we need to ensure that certain things are kept the same between tests so that other factors aren’t negatively affecting the plants or changing things between them. So we will give each plant the same amount of water, from the same source, and we will keep them at the temperature of our house. What we’ve done here is come up with a list of variables, or things that will change in our experiment, and controls, or things that we will keep the same. The variables are the things we are actually testing for, so in this case the only variable in our experiment is how much sun each plant receives. Our controls are things like the time, the amount of water, the type of plant, and room temperature, all things that can affect the experiment but which we are keeping the same to ensure we are only testing our variable. We also came up with a clear set of measurable quantities, and a method of determining how those quantities can be used to test what our variable is doing. From previous experiments that others have done we know that when plants are dying they turn less green, and furthermore a healthy plant will grow taller than an unhealthy one. Once we’ve done the experiment we should now be able to obtain results that we can use to either prove or disprove our initial hypothesis. Either result is good science, and useful information, despite the tendency of publishing houses to only desire positive results.
Notice that we haven’t even done the experiment, but we have already planned it out pretty much entirely. We know what we expect, we know what we will do entirely, and we have some idea of what the results will tell us depending on how they go. This works for both small experiments done as a third grader, and as a PhD student studying something much more complicated. The only difference really is the number of variables and the difficulty in measuring some piece of information, but the concepts are totally the same. I think one of the best things I heard as a graduate student came during a talk given by Robert Langer if I remember correctly, where he said that he encourages his students to start writing their papers at the beginning of the experimental process. I’ve done this throughout my career now, and although my career has been pretty short so far it really makes a huge difference. Ultimately in good science you can write the beginnings of a paper, including the Introduction and reason for the hypothesis to be tested, how you will actually test it, and what question each test will allow you to answer at the beginning of the experimental process. Even for experiments that don’t turn into papers, which as a scientist I can tell you are most of them, the reasoning and method behind each one should be there at the beginning.
The problem with a lot of paranormal claims are that the hypothesis is never really laid out at the beginning, and if it is there is never a way to actually test or falsify the hypothesis due to dogmatism or a desire to believe. Taking the example of Bigfoot, instead of determining if for instance a given footprint could feasibly have come from a real creature, and if so what sort of genus or species it likely belongs to or is most closely related too, we test things that are impossible to determine a real answer too. On those Bigfoot shows their ultimate question is always Is Bigfoot living in this area? the answer to which is almost by definition always going to be a murky and unsatisfying maybe. There is no way to actually test this question, at least in a way that can remove doubt or dogmatism from those that are true believers. In a perfect world, even if we had cameras running 24 hours a day over every part of a given forested area, there would still be room for the possibility that Bigfoot could maybe exist. Perhaps it lives underground, or in the tree’s themselves, or maybe it is so well camoflauged that we simply missed it in our cameras. And there still leaves room for this creature to exist in another forest in an even more remote location. Even despite the fact that there is no feasible way to test the hypothesis “Does Bigfoot Exist?”, dogmatists and true believers will always find a way to allow for their belief to continue. If we go back to the example of our plant experiment, this would be like a group of people who absolutely believed that plants didn’t require sunlight arguing that with each successive experiment we didn’t test the right sort of plant. Although yellow roses might die in darkness, maybe tulips won’t, or certain trees, and on and on.
This dogmatism is really at the heart of the problem of more metaphysical paranormal beliefs like the existence of ghosts. The beliefs themselves are never broken down into easily tested hypothesese, and therefore the questions asked can never hope to answer a given question. Ghost hunting expeditions for instance are always done in extremely different circumstances, with no standards or controls on their testing methods (for instance are the EMF readers calibrated regularly? Do they enclose the area of testing in such a way as to completely remove outside electromagnetic fields? Are the electronic voice phenomena discernible if you are not looking for a given response?), and therefore can’t possibly find evidence that is scientifically sound. But as I discussed in the first episode, perhaps these metaphysical beliefs shouldn’t be tested scientifically at all. We assume with this discussion of science that metaphysical things can be given the scientific treatment that Popper requires, but perhaps they don’t follow the same sort of causal chain that is being tested with the scientific method. Notice as well that scientific dogmatism is also a very real possibility. For those that absolutely reject religion and spirits and everything metaphysical the possibility of the existence of ghosts is not at all feasible. No amount of evidence would convince these scientific dogmatists, because there is always the case that the ghost hunter could simply be faking the results, or misinterpreting them.
I don’t want to make it sound like I am a true believer of either camp, really I try to stay Socratic with this sort of thing. To quote Socrates, or at least our account of Socrates in Plato’s Apology, “I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I kno what I do not know”. We can’t know anything really, other than what we’ve experienced personally. But science gives us a framework by which to test the theories of others, and ideally so long as we stick to this method of testing and verifying claims it is hoped that we can gain knowledge. And so far this sort of method that Popper describes as being scientific has worked really well. As my Spectroscopy teacher always said, “The proof is in the pudding”, we see the fruits of science around us everywhere, and so something about testing the causal chain of nature must be working.
But there are times where the scientific approach fails, and I’m not just talking about how do we explain paranormal claims. Things like emotions, sensations, and almost all of the more wonderful aspects of human life cannot be reduced so far to scientific claims. But once again, the proof is in the pudding. Although we may not know exactly what sadness is, when that Sarah Maclaughlin commercial starts up don’t we all feel a little bit of that emotion? And so can’t we at least attempt to explain that feeling to others, or cause them to have it themselves, so they know somewhat how we are experiencing life at that moment?
So let’s just take it for granted at the moment that science can’t explain everything at this point in time. Ok, fine, but what about the paranormal claims that are trying to make a physical argument? Well, I think for the most part those that are doing that kind of work are really asking the wrong questions, and because of that can’t really get down to some useful info. And that is sort of the hope of this podcast, to not only be entertaining and hopefully somewhat educational, but also to go into the science and attempts at science put out by the paranormal community. But as it stands now, do I think that the search for Bigfoot or Ghosts are really “science”, at least in the way Popper describes? In general no. Besides th
e dogmatism that causes some to always find evidence for a thing in a given area (looking at those of you who call any forested area “squatchy”), the questions are just too big to be really scientific. Bigfoot hunters should ask things like, “could this forest provide enough food for a large mammal?” or “do other large mammals survive without vegetation in mountainous areas”, or “do these foot markings relate to an actual hominid creatures anatomy as we current understand it?”. All of those are scientific questions that get us closer to answering “Could Bigfoot exist here”, and they are things that don’t require a carcass or perfect video footage or anything.
In the same way ghost hunting can be significantly improved if we just do a little bit of controlling for environment, and further if we try to establish a causal chain to the problems we face. Obviously some of the questions related to ghost hunting are far too metaphysical to really have any hope of being answered, but things like “Does infrasound cause people to sense a false spirit presence in a room”, followed by “Is there infrasound in a majority of haunted homes” could remove a lot of ambiguity in the hunt for spirits, and is something that doesn’t require a whole lot of scientific background to look for. Another thing that could help would be to test these machines that are used in the hunt for ghosts against a wider range of conditions. Besides taking them just into haunted homes and seeing if we can get a voice recorded, why not test the same thing under various forms of electromagnetism in a controlled environment. How about put one in an area where there has never been ghost activity, and see if it is possible to get some sort of voice phenomena on record. Even if we don’t have access to the sort of equipment to do those tests, then if you are going to do a ghost hunt in a supposed haunted location why not contain yourself to a single room? Control for variables like drafts by sealing windows, outside noises by putting foam padding on the walls, electromagnetic waves by running a control test before you begin asking any questions/attempting to lure a ghost into a room, and furthermore try to limit the number of humans in the room to further remove unnecessary variation. Not only would that hopefully yield better, more scientifically sound results, I think it would take away a lot of the wackiness that ghost or bigfoot hunting has unfortunately garnered over the years, and maybe allow for some serious scientific questioning to start occurring. I mean the fact that the ghost hunting team on Kroll Show can be mistaken for a REAL ghost hunting team if you just mute the TV is a little unfortunate in my opinion, and something that could do a lot to improve the reputation of the search. Of course there will always be those that refuse out of hand the possibility of the paranormal, but still even answering these small questions scientifically can be useful to our understanding of the natural world.
Historically there has been scientific attempts by major research universities to for instance try to measure and quantify extra sensory perception or psychokinetics, and furthermore research still goes on in some psychology departments to search for things that are not explicable if the mind is simply a manifestation of the body. Another unfortunate but famous example of the science of the paranormal is the doctor in Haverhill Massachusetts who attempted to measure the weight of the soul as it was leaving the body. Dr. Duncan MacDougal claimed that his patients lost approximately 21 grams upon death, however his result has never been replicated and so is now considered to be absolutely incorrect. But still, this is an example of an interesting sort of scientific test of the soul.
I think it is also important however to think about the consequences of taking the mind-body problem, the question of souls or an afterlife, and the related topics of ghosts or physics or whatever, as completely solved by science. It’s one thing to think that there may not be a present force in our universe that acts as some sort of God, and in fact that is the sort of thinking that I am most drawn too. However, to claim that the mind is simply a manifestation of the interlocking parts of the body, ultimately describable by the atomic and subatomic interactions of particles, is to almost necessarily require that the universe is deterministic. Now of course its possible to allow for some scientific reductions without needing everything to be described by determinable particle interactions. Perhaps there are properties of conglomerates of things that are not properties of the things themselves, for instance consciousness as an emergent property of the cells of the brain. But as I described in the first episode, that seems to allow for things that are potentially paranormal, or not explainable by the sciences, such as emergent properties. It should be clear however that free will would be just such an emergent property, at least true free will where every single thing we think, feel, experience, and do is not predetermined, calculable, or related too in any way the interactions of our subatomic particles. This is because subatomic particles and their interactions are by definition deterministic, because we can know from their initial states what they will do at a given time. Now some will argue that quantum mechanics, and the requirements that certain physical quantities cannot be known simultaneously, allows for a certain level of probability and therefore something that seems like non-determinism. However that is an extremely weak argument to my mind. Let’s say we give that objects at the subatomic scale have the ability to not necessarily exist at a single point in space at a given time, but instead in a range of most probable locations at a given time, this still makes no difference when we pull away to the scale of the atoms or molecules that we are composed of. And ultimately that probable location is determinable enough for us to engineer things like lasers that cost less than $20 on Amazon, so does it really make sense that this is the location of our soul? Notice too that this is a shrinking of the magical worldview as described in episode 1, with the magical hypothesis of “free will due to the soul” now being relegated to “probable will due to quantum mechanics”, giving us the same magical thinking but without the magical cause.
Really there is a lot more at stake with the search for paranormal entities such as a soul than most people realize I think, and too many of us are ready and willing to ignore the possibility of paranormal things without taking it too its (at least to my emergent property of the pink spongy conglomerate of cells I hold in my skull) logical conclusion of a deterministic universe. So are paranormal things scientific? Probably not, but if we use science to try and understand them I think it can bring us much closer to some answers to these questions, and make those asking them seem more capable of actually coming to any useful conclusions.
That’s it for this weeks episode, I am hoping to start moving these shows towards more dissection and analysis of particular cases or phenomena themselves. I’m also in the process of coming up with some ways that I can actually test some of these paranormal claims, with upcoming episodes on pet physics as well as ghost hunting methods in the works. However I think next week we will finally dig into the search for Bigfoot, and any scientific progress that has actually been made in that field!